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Nelson Mandela was finally released from prison to global acclaim on 11 February 1990.

Despite being First Secretary (Political) at our Embassy in Cape Town at the time, I missed it. My friend and colleague John (now Sir John) Sawers was there in the thick of the action, and was probably the first British person to greet Mandela in person after all those long years of imprisonment. Which diplomatic and personal nimbleness he is now deploying to good effect as HM Ambassador at the United Nations.

Anyway, I missed this historic moment because I was in deepest Transkei, Mandela's Xhosa home base, at a rally of the ANC's rival the Pan Africanist Congress.

This was a daunting affair, a heaving African crowd crammed into a sweaty hall chanting 'one settler, one bullet'. Mine was the only pink and conspicuously settlerish face for many miles in any direction.

The ANC (with its steely core of Moscow communist discipline) went on to sweep the board in ensuing elections in South Africa, and the PAC disintegrated in the margins.   

Anyway, a few months later the Embassy had relocated to Pretoria for the non-Parliamentary season. The Ambassador was in the UK. His deputy set up a call on Mandela in Soweto and drove off, delighted with his likely 'scoop'. I was left to run the ship on a sleepy afternoon. 

Zzzzz. 

The telephone rings. The security guard at the gate. "Nelson Mandela is here!"

Panic.

I race downstairs to greet Mandela and escort him to the Ambassador's office. His people mutter something unconvincing (and it turned out untrue) about having called us to say that the meeting with the Deputy Head of Mission was to be here, not in Soweto. Urgent calls go out to try to get my boss back to the Embassy asap for the meeting.

So we sat and waited. I, lowly First Sec Pretoria, a very small ant crawling on the vast dunghill of world history, had the most famous person in the world and a couple of his people, all to myself!

We talked mainly about the ghastly violence in KwaZulu, where ANC/SACP members and Inkatha supporters of Zulu leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi were killing each other in large numbers.

At one point Mandela sharply said "Would you people support Buthelezi as President?"

I replied, "If he wins a free and fair election of all South Africans, why not?"

There was a long awkward silence.

Then one of Mandela's people spoke through gritted teeth: "Good answer!"

Eventually Mandela decided not to wait for my boss to return from Soweto and departed, the 'white' South African local staff women in the Embassy jostling to meet him and being charmed to bits.

And to make an exciting day complete, my boss finally arrived. Too late to meet Mandela but complete with speeding ticket. By then I had drafted my telegram to London recording my fascinating encounter. 

Bliss.

In a neat example of government 'spin' in action, David Miliband's speech today about Europe is being trailed in this morning's Guardian.

Once upon a time it was a good enough result to get the speech reported after it had happened. That being unreliable, Labour have taken to a high art the reporting of a speech before it happens.

By giving one or other outlet an 'exclusive' to some of the pre-speech substance they secure positive coverage largely on the government's own terms and, if all goes well, they may get further coverage after the speech takes place.

Two headlines for the price of one!

It of course takes a servile and idle media environment to pull this one off, time after time. But we have one, so that's OK.

The likely speech? Miliband will praise the French for saying they are willing to reintegrate into Nato's command structure, and will insist that a stronger European defence policy does not mean Nato stops being the cornerstone of European defence.

But he will add: "As the Balkans wars in the 1990s demonstrated, unless Europe can develop its own capabilities, it will be consigned always to wait impotently until the US and Nato are ready and able to intervene.

Huh? The Balkans wars in the 1990s demonstrated no such thing. The best available European capabilities (ie British and French) were deployed in large and flexible numbers. It was the political dithering in Washington and other capitals including ours that created so many problems. 

In any case, ever since PM Blair and President Chirac launched European Defence back in 1998, the deep problem has been that Europe wants to avoid paying for it.

Even better, pay even less. And so the gap between collective EU defence spending and US spending grows and grows.

So instead of dwelling on that failure of their own leadership and looking hard at Priorities, EU leaders prefer to fiddle with the structures.

More structure = less flexibility. By creating more 'European' defence we effectively give a greater say over our possible deployments to all those countries who contribute very little but have huge opinions on everything.

Will we hear one day an honest speech from a Foreign Secretary looking at substance not spin and saying something about that?

This sorry Swedish story attracted fleeting global attention.

A school in Sweden confiscated a boy's party invitations being handed out to his friends as two classmates were not invited:

"Two people in class had not been invited, and that is not allowed. The ones who were not invited felt sad and left out," the school principal, who was not named, told the paper.

Let's assume that the two who were not invited had in some way or the other upset the party-host.

The boy hosting the party decides not to invite them. Cause - meet Effect!

The idea that behaviour has consequences is life's one core rule. Our world depends on it.

Society ideally should be organised so that Good Behaviour has Good Consequences; Bad Behaviour has Bad Consequences.

And if those basic principles are not taught and learned at school, when are they taught and learned?

What if the very distinction between Good and Bad is seen as ... discrimination? 

Thus to the Mandela Birthday Party in London. And the revolting spectacle of Annie Lennox on stage twittering on about HIV/AIDS, when Mandela has done so little about the utterly awful policies of President Mbeki in this area which have led to the deaths of countless South Africans.   

Then on to the African Union gathering, where 'President' Mugabe is welcomed as if nothing untoward had happened in his country's 'election'. Again, Mandela has done nothing to make a difference.

On the day France takes over the EU Presidency let us recall the infamous words of Jean-Paul Sartre in 1961:

The rebel’s weapon is the proof of his humanity. For in the first days of the revolt you must kill: to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free man; the survivor, for the first time, feels a national soil under his foot.

We see now that J-PS was 100% wrong.

Those African Marxist liberators, so generously supported by Sweden, did killing enough. But they remained unfree, locked in a profound Marxist/Swedish moral syndrome of Total Irresponsibility.

Unable to accept criticism, unable to set their standards high, ultimately loyal (like Mandela) not to their people but only to their own political movements.

Nor are we former colonialists free either, since we carry on sending 'assistance' to these villains, patronisingly subsidising and extending their countries' moral and actual impoverishment.

In Africa thanks to generations of the best Euro-Swedish non-judgmental educational thinking and development policies, Bad Behaviour has Quite Good consequences.

Result?

Disaster. Of course.

But it's no-one's fault. Except maybe ours.

Update: I learn that many schools in the UK and not only in Sweden have these 'all or no-one' policies for parties. Including the school where my daughter goes(!). They have a variation - it is OK within one class for girls to invite only girls to a party, and boys only boys. Hmm.

Not clear to me what exactly the 'policy' means. It is not (I think) in any contract one signs with the school. In practice it is little more than an impertinent device to give teachers an easier life, and maybe these days they need one.

Yet it is deeply perverse. Imagine if the teachers at a school were told that if they host a party at home they had to invite all their teacher colleagues. They would say 'Get Lost! It's my house and I'll invite whom I like.'

Parents and children are not extended a similar freedom and the accompanying responsibility?

... and there is Lileks, in full flow explaining the magnificence of Wall-E.

President Kaczynski of Poland says that 'for now' he will not sign the EU's Lisbon Treaty.

The BBC report describes Kaczynski as "a conservative who has long opposed the reform treaty". But what about this? "I really want ratification."

One way or the other, President Kaczynski is good at saying exactly what he thinks, so unless the Irish come round to accepting the Treaty of their own free will there is no chance of Poland signing it.

Plus, unlike (I suspect) almost every politician in Europe talking at great length about the Treaty, President Kaczynski will have read it with great care, identifying exactly what he likes and what he does not like.

As a lawyer himself with a beady eye for detail, he is comfortable in the view that if the EU's own rules say that an EU Treaty has to be approved by every country, one country has the right to say No and block the Treaty. Which ends the matter.

Anything else (he argues) means that the rules on paper are not the rules in practice, which means that the EU Strong tend to fix the game. And after the experience of the past century, that is just the sort of thing which Poland has good reason not to want.

Plenty of Poland's politicians will now make a big noise saying that in taking this position Kaczynski is not being 'European', while quietly being quite pleased that if the Treaty founders Poland keeps the (for Poland) terrific Nice voting formula all the longer.

President Sarkozy takes over the EU Presidency today:

"Something isn't right. Something isn't right at all ... Europe worries people and, worse than that, I find, little by little our fellow citizens are asking themselves if, after all, the national level isn't better equipped to protect them than the European level."

Sarkozy called such thinking a "step backward".

Would Kaczynski argue that sticking to the rules is in fact the first step forward?

Today I spotted this April piece about the decline and fall of the BBC, from More Intelligent Life:

Last Sunday wasn't the most eventful one in world history. But it wasn't short of news either. In the United States, the Democratic infighting takes a dramatic new twist with Senator Obama's guns-and-religion gaffe. In Britain, there was open talk of Labour disenchantment with Gordon Brown, the party's prime minister. In Italy, a general election looked likely to bring Europe's most colourful politician to power. In Africa, regional leaders chose to sit on their hands as Robert Mugabe's thugs clubbed their way to keeping him in power, yet again. Food riots in Haiti symbolised the soaring price of the world's basic grains. In Washington, top officials of the seven leading economies gave grim warnings about the credit crunch.

So what does the British Broadcasting Corporation pick on to lead its evening television news? Five young British women have been killed in a bus crash in Ecuador.

Minute after minute -- four or five, I'd guess, in a 20-minute bulletin -- the report drags on, complete with (justifiably) sorrowing parents, the usual tributes (equally justified, let us trust) and the plastered-on solemnity of journalistic grief in which the BBC is now so expert ...

...  Still, the BBC is a national institution, supported by public funds. It has a duty to deliver public-service information. That means hard news. Instead, the Beeb's editors specialise increasingly in mawkish sentimentality with its bunches of plastic-wrapped flowers, its standard clichés of public sorrow and de mortuis nil nisi bunkum ...

The bad news is that the FCO also has moved strongly into this mawkish territory in recent years.

As part of a trite urge to make the FCO look 'relevant', FCO Ministers issued new instructions to the global network of Ambassadors.

If more than a handful of British citizens look to have been involved in a 'serious incident' (Note: defined at a very low level, eg a motorway car pile-up with say five deaths) the Ambassador personally is expected to drop everything (CAP reform, Climate Change, Terrorism) and go straight to the scene.

Once there he/she is expressly instructed to deploy the 3 Ps:

What the public expects to hear from you/your spokesman/Minister/official after a major incident :

Pity:         sympathy for the victims and their families

Praise:      praise for/thanks to the emergency services etc

Pledge:     a promise/pledge to get to the bottom of what has happened -  and learn any lessons 

Yuck.

Is not there something wrong here? Namely a complete loss of proportion?

Hundreds of thousands of British people travel in different parts of the world every day. Just by the forces of Bad Luck a tiny number will hit trouble, of whom a small proportion alas will get killed or injured.

Of those, a proportion will have suffered because they themselves messed up in one way or the other (not least ignoring FCO warnings).

Of these, some of them or their relatives will rush to whinge to the media about the FCO support they received, merely to assuage their own incompetence or guilt.

That's how it is.

High-level official emoting-by-numbers when there really has not been a major disaster - involving (say) at a minimum several scores of British deaths in one go - is nothing other than a dangerous dumbing down of the way we all look at Life and its Priorities.

Memo to next Foreign Secretary, and indeed this one:

The media love to pounce on allegations of FCO staff being unkind or inefficient when they find British citizens overseas who have hit trouble. For every hundred people who write in to you with profuse letters of thanks, there are a number who complain - sometimes fairly, sometimes not - to the media.

It makes no sense to pander to the ensuing synthetic media tantrum.

Next time the media attack FCO consular staff doing their best, go on the offensive. Say bluntly that it is not realistic to expect the government to respond in a perfect way to suit every traveller who has a problem overseas, any more than it can be expected to sort out every problem at home.

And add that just as there are a proportion of people who abuse social services at home, there are a number of British travellers who through their own folly or carelessness get into trouble overseas, then selfishly expect the taxpayer to bail them out. The FCO team does what it can to help within the limited resources paid in to this work by Parliament, but not everyone will be happy, and not everyone who complains will have a fair case.

Pressed why the Ambassador did not go personally to the scene of a car-crash, say that he/she is paid to deal with high priority policy subjects - the Embassy has a team of trained experts for that sort of work, who did get there and responded properly.

Likely result? A howl of media and pseudo-public protest.

How dare you be so unfeeling? Don't you care? Not about your silly policies, but about real people?

You say that you do indeed care, which is why HM Ambassadors are dealing with issues which affect the lives of millions of British citizens, not the very few in this case who indeed have experienced such a sad personal loss.

Keep saying the same thing every time an incident like this happens, using a strong firm adult leadership voice.

Eventually they'll go away.

The Persian pocket empire never had a government or a civil society: it only had a court and a bazaar, which are incapable of managing the affairs of a modern society. There is no political party, no social movement, in fact no form of popular organization of any kind capable of handling $350 million a day of oil revenue at present prices.

Iran crashing?  A trenchant read.

We think that we are pretty darn smart these days, what with all our clever new inventions.

But in seventy years' time, won't we look a bit ... quaint?

Serving as HM Ambassador in Belgrade from 2001-2003 I had the task of advising London on how best to handle the aspirations of demands in Montenegro for independence from Serbia.

At the time European capitals were just getting over the NATO bombing campaign aimed at ending Milosevic's appalling rule over Kosovo. So further Balkanization of the Balkans did not seem like a good idea, especially when opinion in Montenegro itself was pretty evenly divided.

Then Foreign Secretary Robin Cook took the view that such issues should not be decided on a wafer-thin minority. He also thought, looking at the Bosnia disaster, that it made no sense to support Montenegrin independence if the largest single 'ethnic' community in Montenegro (ie Serbs) were opposed to it.

Plus opinion had moved against Montenegro's ambitious leader Milo Djukanovic. He had brushed aside personal appeals from US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright that he take part in the 2000 elections in the then Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to help bring Milosevic down. I stood in the FCO main courtyard listening to her in Washington remonstrate with him in Podgorica via the cell-phone of a US diplomat listening in on the animated conversation.

Djukanovic miscalculated. He thought that as Milosevic was bound to win by hook or by crook he would stand vindicated by boycotting the phoney election.

But Milosevic crashed. Leaving Djukanovic with the problem of remaining credible in Western eyes while standing aloof of FRY processes.

Djukanovic had his eye set on independence for Montenegro. He put his head down and decided not to cooperate on Western terms.

This did not work out as he hoped. He eventually in 2002 was compelled to agree to a new loose formation called 'Serbia and Montenegro', seen at the time as a major success for 'EU Foreign Policy'.

But nothing really worked properly in SAM. The Montengrins stalled, playing for time. Serbia's post-Djindjic leadership were unable to project any coherent policy, torn between fear of being seen as 'interfering' and unable to do much to help Montenegro's Serbs or to appeal to non-Serb Montenegrins.

My name during my posting in Belgrade was of course mud in Montenegro pro-independence circles, as I loyally pursued HMG's and EU/US policy of working to keep Serbia and Montenegro together.

All manner of banal communistic tricks were used against me when I visited Podgorica. Blatant telephone and conversation tapping. Grotesque personal attacks against me in the official and non-official pro-Djukanovic media.

I reported one especially lively piece to London in July 2002 in a telegram entitled 'Slimed!'. In it I recorded that I had been publicly denounced in Podgorica as a tool of MI5 and MI6, a Serbian nationalist with a love of "oriental cuisine, grilled meat, monasteryism and Smederevo wine". The article said that had Montenegro already achieved independence, I would have been PNG'd: "Note: as good an argument for independence as I have seen".

Anyway, I left Belgrade in mid-2003. The EU policy I was instructed to pursue steadily lost its way. The Patten (ie monied) part of the EU's external effort did not throw its weight wholeheartedly behind the Solana achievement. So much for European foreign policy

And lo, in 2006 Montenegro finally achieved its independence.

If Montenegro is now independent of Serbia it is not obviously independent of Russia, which has hit upon the happy idea of just buying goodly chunks of it.

Life goes on.

There I was in a Brussels restaurant last week when in walks Milo Djukanovic with a sizeable pack of Balkan security types, little plastic curly things sprouting from all available ears.

We greeted each other warmly. I congratulated him on Montenegro's independence and we exchanged visiting cards.

As ever, I praise fine technique.

Djukanovic knew what he wanted. And he got it.

A text-book example of a tiny, highly focused and sustained ambition defeating far larger but uncertain and disorganised opponents.

One of the most piquant features of the British Parliamentary voting system is that it is so well established and so well analysed that pundits can predict with a high degree of accuracy which MPs will lose their seats for any given % swing of opinion against the government at the next election.

Thus the current group of Labour MPs are staring at the opinion polls in horror, as so many of them stand to be Out next time round if things carry on as they are.

Thus the Labour ship heads boldly for the rocks. At what point do the crew rebel and heave the captain overboard?

Robert Mugabe of course sets Gordon Brown a magnificent example in full steam ahead political navigation when rocks are looming.

Robert. Gordon. Names of great richness in Scotland.

Are these two leaders by some chance related?